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Sport 39: 2011
Uninvited Tribute: Eight Uneasy Pieces
Uninvited Tribute: Eight Uneasy Pieces
i
Blood clouding (by rumour) the lipped chalice,
salting (taste it!) the broad bay’s shelving off,
brimming too the victim’s eye with west’s
impending wrack, shadows silked as
te mako’s cruising, closer in by far.
Pretty much, pretty much as is,
the refrain falling as a flung stick
for a bitch’s late run morsing
the beach’s narrowing stretch,
belling vespers’
high memo, as Father once lofted
Lessons, boy, to be learned!
ii
Raised
tall as talked-up tallness
in the child’s knee-high version
the author of all clenched close
as a favourite marble
ancestors loading the skyline
at ease as stone.
page 54
What you touch is what you
fathom
what you see
is the eye opening, radiant
paddocks otherwise special
than in scything hymns.
The harbour’s bright bill of lading
taking time on tick.
iii
And spring, let the season
spare the boy’s bare-heeled
bracing of cold in Lyttelton
shame as Fred Page read
it, church-poor and poorer
than the coalyard’s brothers,
the cricketer, the pianist,
who at least clanged boots.
Bells
though tempered nicely
given time, given times,
the boy’s to the end and beyond
good as newly rung.
Young
Page insisting, ‘Vain
at that age even,’ playgrounds
reminisced, the iron-clappered
pealing from father & Father
to ensuing sons.
The steeple
on course to be fractured,
the time-ball crazed.
And the shock of the poems,
writes Allen,
scores still to come.
iv
A wet wind rumours the macrocarpa
proposing nothing but itself.
A branch cracks.
A bird’s damp flut. Light
talks through rain.
Much as pyramids,
as duomos, up to the same lurk, wind
urging on,
the instant barked to heel.
‘Maestro
to the pit’ as they call at the Met,
awaiting the beat, assuming il mundo
magnifico’s scoring, delivering time.
v
‘Not a nice lad, especially.’
S o?
The boy unpacking language, his special meccano,
flexing the big tin pieces, defting tiny screws.
‘See what I build for myself’ is the morning’s news.
A which is his to begin with, down to Z in tow.
vi
As Stevens your closest wordmate plied you,
‘There is no such thing as innocence in autumn.’
The old labels float, the brand names wear.
Poets inclining, picturesquely, to scuff at leaves,
call variants of red by their variable names,
testing the touch of what remains in mind.
page 56
‘So it goes,’ breath flaring through the lot,
a man with his fires smoking out the night,
‘Words to enflame,’ as he says, the fun of the phrase
refuting the by-heart preacher, ‘This takes care of time.’
One spark feeding another, the point of rhyme.
vii
The cliff face bleeds, the wound is personal.
The slaughtering wrist aches with expertise.
Myth slips its scarlet needles to the harbour’s vein.
The business of breath catches at vacated space.
How a late stroll to the west shoulders sharking dark.
How the whole damned empyrean makes its move!
viii
Hommage:
as if you’d have tossed it
a second word, as if privacy wasn’t
bunkered in each public stanza,
as if nailing as good as a century
with the scorer’s crest
wasn’t tribute drilled
from the only well that pays:
as if Self
spelled out in increasing type
hadn’t pressed you as surrogate Adam,
the one world launched to a tongue’s fathom,
on cue each calling
necessary once named.